SLICK SWISS SWISH IN STUNNING BARCELONA

These were conditions that sailors, coaches, team bosses and backers dream about – flat water, blue skies, 13-16 knots of building south-easterly ‘Garbi’ breeze filtering in from the African plains and an empty dance floor to practice your moves upon. Only Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli joined the party, flying around in their beautifully-liveried AC40 but for the Swiss who had the recon team following closely, it was a day to impress. And impress they did.

Starting out with the big J1 headsail up, the Swiss clearly preferred take-off on port tack with the Emirates Team New Zealand flat T-foil immersed and after going through the gears to get the requisite hull speed and flow over the foil, they were off and flying for a day that would see the team eventually cover some 90 nautical miles over a big five hour, intense, practice session. The intensity was revealed by the GPS track with the Swiss keeping resolutely to the America’s Cup course area up and down the La Barceloneta beachfront on tightly controlled training matrices to drill in the manoeuvres and work through the asymmetric pitch and ride height requirements on BoatZero.

In flight and in transit at warp speed, both the American Magic anhedral port foil and the ETNZ flat starboard look demonstrably stable with the Flight Controllers able to dial down low to the water’s surface upwind and keep a mid-to-high flight downwind. The difficulty comes through the manoeuvres and as an example, and caught on camera, was a gybe from starboard to port (going from the AM foil to the ETNZ foil) where on the board drop of the starboard arm, the bow flicks upwards into the turn as the starboard foil bites and then the stern seems to dig in regardless of the exit angle that the helmsman steers. Frustrating for the sailors but these are touch & go manoeuvres that will be building resilience into both the Flight Controllers and the helms for when they get their new boat in 2024. When that arrives, with symmetric foils, AC75 sailing will be a breeze for the Swiss – that’s the theory at least.

The session started with the J1 up in just 6 knots of breeze and this was a great day for cross-over calculations with the team skipping to the J3, perhaps ambitiously, as the anemometer registered 10 knots. As we saw with the Kiwis on Wednesday, the code skip gives the sailors the opportunity to sail with an under-canvassed jib at the lower end of its range to assess target speed goals and play with the manipulation of sail shape. It’s a valuable exercise that will have the performance analysts at Alinghi Red Bull Racing poring over data this evening and also allows for increased flying time on the water without the need to change down further until the wind increases. 

And sure enough, as the afternoon progressed, the wind built to a solid 13-16 knots and the J3 was at its top-end so the long-footed J4 came into play for a final session, repeating the training runs of before. Great sailing from the team who’s commitment to the commitment is admirable.

Speaking afterwards, Théry Schir, a key member of the Power Group and one of the most affable team members in the AC community, gave a great summary of the day saying: “The conditions were perfect, so we went through different manoeuvres, different settings, different metrics, and everyone one is super happy after this week of sailing where we had four days of sailing out of five, so this was a very productive week.”

And Théry also gave an insight into how the team are focussed at the moment saying: “Well I mean I still feel like we're a very young team, we started from like almost two years ago from now and we since we arrived in Barcelona the learning curve has been very, very, steep and we can see improvement from one day to another and I guess this is the team’s target first to catch up the teams that have more experience.”

That bridge to the teams with ‘more experience’ is shortening all the time and with Alinghi Red Bull Racing continuing to focus relentlessly hard on their training programme day after day, the improvements have been coming fast. Looking at their performance numbers from this week, their foil-to-foil percentage has been consistently at 90% or above. Today their gybe percentage foil-to foil was 92% and the tack percentage at 88.5%. Numbers not to be sniffed at considering the asymmetry of BoatZero. Impressive and consistent. That’s the Swiss in a nutshell. (Magnus Wheatley)

On-Water Recon Unit Report – Alinghi Red Bull Racing: Alinghi Red Bull Racing had a blistering 5h sailing session on the AC75 ‘BoatZero’ in building wind conditions. The team rolled out their AC75 at 9:00h. The yacht was craned in, and the usual pre-sailing checks were carried out, with engineers onboard testing hydraulics on the mast and both foils.

The team docked out at 11:00h, hoisting the M2-2R mainsail and J1-2R headsail inside the port and being towed out by 11:23h. The wind conditions outside were 5knts from 190º with some clouds all over the city and hazy on the horizon. Only Luna Rossa with their one design AC40 and the Swiss were spotted training today on the waters off Barcelona.

The Swiss started sailing in displacement mode by the port entrance, following by several self-take-offs always on port tack, apparently It's easier for them to create lift with their T starboard foil in light wind conditions. As the wind was barely reaching 6 knots, they were struggling and touching-down with the first manoeuvres, until they did a long downwind approaching to El Forum.

With a building breeze of 10 knots average at 13:42h, the team substituted the J1-2R with a J3-1R and did two laps upwind-downwind. Flying low during the upwind, and maintaining 44 knots of speed downwind and through the gybes there was an immediate touch of leeward heel, driving on the immersed foil before inducing wicked windward heel and power.

At 13:34h, after almost two hours of sailing the chase boat approached and the cyclors rotated as new batteries went onboard. At 13.57h, after the hydration break, they foiled for one hour following the same upwind-downwind manoeuvres pattern. Right after, with a tow line and 13 knots from the south and choppy sea state, they went for the third jib configuration of the day, dropping the J3-1R and hoisting the J4-1 headsail.

The last stint of the session started at 15:17h, with a zig-zagging long bear away and ended up with eighteen tacks approaching to the harbour entrance, where the day wrapped up with sails lowered at 16:00h, after which the yacht was towed back to the base, docking in at 16:20h.

The team covered a total of 90 nautical miles over five hours on the water, 160min were spent sailing with 62 manoeuvres performed, 90% fully foiling. (Elia Miquel- ARBR Recon Unit.)